So I wonder. Did BP stick 400-500 clean-up worker extras on Grand Isle without Hazmat training?

So I was trying to find an update to the bused in oil-spilled beach cleanup workers story that came about Friday on the tail of Pres Obama's visit to Grand Isle. I searched some of the local news topix-net forums at a Grand Isle local news site without luck. All I managed to find the next day was a rather badly mangled Fox8 local news account. 40- 50 or in the hundreds? From their reporting it's impossible to know. They report. You decide.

http://www.fox8live.com/news/local/story/Grand-Isle-residents-upset-with-the-cleanup-effort/PgHBPSnvsU2Sw6ZEv69l8w.cspx

Just once, though, their reporting (the day before ) was pretty consistent with other outlets'. (more links to some of those below).



http://www.fox8live.com/news/local/story/JP-councilman-questions-Grand-Isle-cleanup/WPIiExLxcEWV21ClpEtt8A.cspx

Hazardous suits?




David Grunfeld / The Times-PicayuneOil cleanup workers line Louisiana 1 in Grand Isle on Friday as the motorcade of President Barack Obama passes.

Does it depend on the day, Mr Nalty?

(see pics)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=8444996&mesg_id=8446650

Workers hired by BP rake up globs of oil, which have come ashore on the beaches in southern Louisiana, near Port Fourchon and Grand Isle. It coats the beaches, and each wave brings a new batch.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times / May 22, 2010)


A couple other links to the background story:













I'd like to know more from Nalty, too. He denies the locals' story, he denies the few workers' stories, and "He doesn't buy it." ? He seems to be the point man in the various media interviews-- he's the one cited in more than one account as the subcontractor responsible for hiring of cleanup crews to go to Grand Isle. He's the one telling the media exactly how many will be back the NEXT day. Yet HE doesn't/won't say where they were hired and brought in from, and all the accounts cite that the workers were guarded with both the media and the local officials, both. The most reported in any of the accounts is that a few DID tell locals they were hired the day before. One said they were hired just for the day.

I was really curious about that-- where they were hired from. Why is that all supposed to be a state secret of some kind?

As I'd posted on Friday, this would seem like a good bet, for starters:



Here's a question. Did those bused in workers have the protection and benefit of the 24- 40 hours of Hazmat training?

It's not in the recruitment ad. Did BP stick 400-500 people on the beach cleanup at the 11th hour without it? The brief CNN video clip does show them working on the beach. If they had it, does it include any training of disposal of their hazmat coverings at the end of the day? In the first link, locals said they were finding them in the town dumpsters and had to call BP to come and remove them. (they did.)

So do ALL the workers get hazmat suits or not? Do they all get the vital training? Or not?

Something's fishy with Mr. CEO and Mr. Nalty. There are inconsistencies after inconsistency. Why won't BP/Nalty or anyone own up to the contradictions by locals and why should it be a secret who hired them and provided the buses?

Is Nalty telling us the truth? If he is, he's not very good at it. A President is coming. Did BP/Nalty really think no one would notice the same-day invasion of 400 workers out of "nowhere"?

And at what price, if any, to those workers' health were they put out there for the cleanup/visit/cameras?

All Nalty has to do is tell us the date and place they were hired from.



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(edited for wrecked formatting )

This is nothing short of CRIMINAL on BP's part.

protection,they are admitting that they know the sites are dangerous, thus opening themselves to lawsuits.

There are mountains of evidence that this stuff is harmful if inhaled. Not just in America, in incidents globally, it's all fucking there. And BP can't possibly claim ignorance. You can't be a major oil company and then go "Dyerhur, we's gots no ideer how tha thar oil stuff dun work!"

The perverted "logic" is attempting to minimize the PR damage and hide/mask the extent of damage; the same reason why they are using toxic dispersants in unprecedented amounts.

I wasn't denying that that was what was going on. I just wanted to read it myself.

The same thing went down with the Exxon Valdez. And I know - personally know - people who are dying from exposure to thisstuff, all these years later. Cancers are the lest of the problems, these chemicals are also a source of "mystery diseases", autoimmune problems, you name something unpleasant and you can find it in the body of someonefro mcordova or Valdez who worked on the spill.

Twenty years later and it looks as if people have already forgotten.

they should be insisting there be proper training and protective gear.
BP cannot be trusted - just today Hayward said the workers are sickened with FOOD POISONING.

for this crisis, as others have suggested, unified and organized under responsible federal oversight, training and safety authorities.

I was looking at the jobs boards-- it appeared on those that much or all of it is being locally piece-mealed out by one private temp hiring service after another.

Don't know the details on those specific workers, but Nalty's clearly lying about the 24 - 40 hour training being required.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8444883

Mr Nalty's story has a lot of problems like that.

He's tap dancing all over the place.

I just started thinking about another aspect of this.

BP has clearly outsourced much of the hiring and training of clean-up workers to companies like Nalty's and Command Center and who knows how many others. It's becoming clearer by the day that they are not being trained, and are not being provided with decent wages and proper safety equipment. If this follows the pattern of the Exxon Valdez, many of these workers are likely to become ill. There are violations at each stage of that, but since BP outsourced it, I'll bet they will lay that blame on the companies they outsourced to and will try to weasel out of any responsibility from that.

in some cases, as reported, is meant to help limit their exposure (the smaller companies') for as long as possible, too, maybe?

Man, there is so much that seems so systemically (systematically?) messed up.

PS. Thank you so much for all the stuff you pulled together in your linked thread

against later claims.

And again, doing the minimum for safety, etc which is what brought about this whole mess in the 1st place.

The minimum the government will allow needs to be set much, much higher in all theses areas.

And thank you for your thread.

This is what I love about DU, caring people pulling together info to make sense of it all and investigate and examine the whole picture.

The dispersant is toxic.
Crude oil contains toxic fractions.
You can'tjust pick homeless out of the Vieux Carré or City Park.
And you can't "retrain" jobless shrimpers in an hour.

One of the "folk legends" that I have picked up about crude oil fumes is that they are carcinogenic to sweat gland areas.

My orginal post had a single pic itself (no bird) but I edited for formatting and now the edit window is past, as I remember the other pics at the link. My apologies.

which I theorize was the hiring source for the workers from the local gov't recruitment ad..

Their current website was still under construction just two weeks ago. It's very generic looking and sparse in content and the footer doesn't tell you when it was launched or designed by who, but here's a cached version of it being under construction as of May 14:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6NZQzPnXV_QJ:www.ashlandservicesllc.com/+who+owns+ashland+services+llc&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

In their "about", they refer to the ownership, but the ownership isn't identified.

The Ownership of Ashland Services has over fifty years of contract labor experience, Ship building, Fabrication in Steel, Aluminum, and Stainless, Sand Blasting and Painting, Tank Cleaning, and Coating.

They say they've been around since 2005 & Katrina. I don't doubt they are a legit company, but I'd like to know more about their actual ownership. I'm not finding much of anything else on the web about them.

Does anybody know the company, or anybody good with domain tools and whois stuff?